Earlier this month, Taylor Swift launched her 1989 World Tour, her largest and most elaborate spectacle yet. Tens of thousands of Swifties will pack the arenas and baseball stadiums of these United States to see pop’s reigning princess. Swift’s fanbase is diverse, ranging from the usual menagerie of rabid teenagers to adults who flooded the same arenas a generation earlier to see Britney Spears. The message is clear: America has finally learned to stop worrying and love pop.

It was May 9, 2007, and Amy was performing at the Highline Ballroom in New York City. This was before the Highline threw V.I.P.’s and press in the balcony and allowed them to sit side-stage in an area the size of a baby’s fist. I was covering the show that evening, and considering how packed the venue was, I just needed a tiny corner in the V.I.P. nook to at least post up and take some notes. No one expected Amy to actually get through this performance because she was already fucking up, as Back to Black was only six months old. I stood in the back of the piled up section, adjacent to a booth filled with a bunch of cockney accents. A guy who looked like Ethan Embry with a slight meth face and a fedora was sitting closest to where I was standing. "Jussit on the railing, lahv," he said to me, pointing to the railing behind me. And so I did.

When Amy hit the stage, she looked directly at him. And then she looked directly at me. Her ice grill was enough to give my eyes hypothermia, as she volleyed glares back-and-forth between me and not-Ethan Embry for the duration of her set. I later learned that was Blake Fielder-Civil sitting next to me, but still had no idea why Amy would want to murder anyone in his vicinity with a uterus. The Amy documentary (directed by Asif Kapadia) cleared all of that up and more.

When NYC rapper and 50 Cent doppelganger Troy Ave was profiled for his spot on the 2014 XXL Freshmen list, he seemed to overestimate his own status: "I thought the Freshmen cover was going to make it happen. Now, it’s going to happen either way. If they didn’t put me, it would be an outrage." It was a weird thing to hear from someone without a charting single or breakout mixtape to his credit. There were no reports of majors circling trying to scoop him up like the list’s other indie floaters, Chance the Rapper and Vic Mensa. He didn’t have a signature moment remotely as catalyzing as Rich Homie Quan’s "Type of Way" or Lil Durk’s "Dis Ain’t What You Want". Many were unsure of what exactly he’d done to even warrant selection. Yet, there he was, standing among several lauded up-and-comers (many of whom had already arrived) proclaiming himself their equal with little to no proof. One month later, he was on the main stage at Hot 97’s annual Summer Jam concert sharing a stage with Nicki Minaj, Nas, and 50 himself.

Fast forward to two weeks ago and Troy Ave was again performing on the main stage at Summer Jam, this time as a surprise guest and closer, promoting his new album, Major Without a Deal, which boasts big-time NYC guests (50, Cam’ron, Fat Joe, Fabolous, Jadakiss, and A$AP Ferg) and a single, "Doo Doo". NYC rap tastemakers have been force-feeding Ave as the city’s Next Great Hope for some time now, and it’s granted him quite a bit of unwarranted primetime exposure. Last May, Drew Millard wrote a takedown of Troy Ave’s rising stardom for Noisey, citing specifically the shadiness of his relationships with figures in New York rap media (Ave ironically took to Hot 97 to trash Millard in response), and it’s hard to argue there isn’t some sort of backchanneling taking place considering the last rapper to perform on the main stage at Summer Jam in back-to-back years—2 Chainz—had 14 songs reach the Top 15 on the Billboard Rap Chart during that span. Troy Ave has zero. The NYC hip-hop machine has been pushing Troy Ave’s music as the new (read: current yet stodgily nostalgic) sound of the city, but there was a hitch: nobody is buying it, literally or figuratively.

It’s an enormous understatement to say that a lot had happened to the Grateful Dead between '67 and '74. They gained and lost keyboardists, drummers, and vocalists. They started their own record label. They were ripped off by shady managers. They helped develop one of the most innovative, high tech sound systems ever created. They played hundreds upon hundreds of shows, from the ballrooms of San Francisco to fields in England. They did it all while (usually) doing copious amounts of mind-altering drugs.

Nos Primavera Sound is a festival that takes place in the beautiful Portuguese coastal town of Porto. It’s got a smaller lineup than the Barcelona festival that takes place the week before, but there is plenty of crossover and it's very much its own festival owing to its setting amid the hills, trees, and ponds of the Parque da Cidade. Some of the most essential sets I saw in Porto were the much ballyhoed Babes in Toyland reunion, the Juan MacLean, Ex Hex, and Pharmakon along with the Portuguese artists that opened the festival that that yet to make an impact in the United States. Full disclosure: I am not a student of Portuguese music, past or present—just a human being who’s always willing to learn something new (especially if that means learning about that thing while sipping port wine in an ocean-side park). Here’s what I found.

When people complain about celebrities it’s always about the wrong things—sure, celebrity culture is making us ever more shallow and narcissistic, but what we should be irate about is the tangible, provable stuff like how they’re bad for the environment.

Celebrities fly around in private jets, have huge-ass houses full of too much stuff, maintain sprawling green lawns in areas wracked by drought, and then encourager fans to emulate their consumption-based lifestyles. It’s amazing that more environmental activists haven’t organized campaigns against them.

Among the relatively small subset of celebs who’ve made eco-friendliness part of their personal brand, will.i.am stands out as being well-educated on the topic and self-aware. He’s also the first famous person I’ve ever heard actually come out and acknowledge that their fame has a negative impact on the environment.

Kanye West’s seventh studio album remains a mystery. No one knows if it is finished, if he’s scrapped several versions of it, if he’s still tinkering with it, or if it’s been sitting somewhere, done, for months. Seth Rogen heard a live version of one, rapped to him in a van by Kanye himself, in December. Theophilus London heard one three times back to back, or tweeted that he did before swiftly retracting, a few months before that. The title keeps changing: It was going to be called So Help Me God for a bit, and now, apparently, he’s calling it SWISH, which seems about as likely to stick as Good Ass Job. It might come out in a few hours, or tomorrow, or months from now. The only thing that seems clear is that Kanye cares less about this album than any other he’s ever made.

Later this month Mogwai will celebrate their 20th anniversary with shows at Glasgow’s Barrowland Ballroom and London’s Roundhouse. That the Scottish quintet has held on for this long is laudable: Post-rock, and instrumental music in general, hasn’t been particularly cool for over a decade now; the indie mainstream’s embrace of pop has left the dour guitar heroics of bands like Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Explosions in the Sky seeming a bit stuffy and overwrought. In 2015, post-rock sounds decidedly pre-Internet—its primary aesthetic focus (build tension, release tension, repeat) out of step with the genre-blind, nostalgia-obsessed, and altogether sunnier musical cultures that have thrived on the Web.

Of course, in post-rock’s late-'90s heyday the Glasgow band were a huge deal, particularly in the UK. And the fact that they survived the vast hype that emerged in the wake of Young Team, their 1997 debut, is the other reason that their two decades together is such a feat. A record like Young Team—one that simultaneously defined a genre while running up against its limits—would have felled a lesser band, particularly one as young and naïve as Mogwai were. After all, where do you go from there?

"People joke all the time about castrati this or that," says Pat Grossi, "but I promise you all is intact." Given the ethereal, even otherworldly nature of Grossi’s music—he’s the soprano-range singer, harp player, and producer behind Active Child—you could be forgiven for finding even the most discreet of dick jokes unexpected coming from him.

Grossi’s forthcoming LP, Mercy, is a maudlin and sentimental record full of longing and loss, aided by rich analog-sounding synth, plucked harp, and ambient samples. At the center of it all, there’s Grossi voice: a delicate-yet-powerful soaring falsetto.